Thursday, November 7, 2013

I'm not sure how I missed Ursula Sims-Williams' post last March on the route from Delhi to Qandahar. The road book she describes is so much more elaborate (and beautiful) than the 4 versions of the Chahar Gulshan with which I've been working these past few years.* There must be some way to use all that rectilinearity in the representation of the route between Patiala and Ludhiana in my studies of imperial gardens...
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*Side note: I'm grateful to Ursula Sims-Williams for her help in procuring additional documentation about the Chahar Gulshan when I was at the British Library in 2008!

Friday, October 11, 2013

I found this photo of Kuhldip Singh via SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive). SAADA "is an independent national
non-profit organization working to create a more inclusive society by
giving voice to South Asian Americans through documenting, preserving,
and sharing stories that represent their unique and diverse experiences."

Thursday, September 12, 2013

I was very pleased to see the e-mail from my former colleague at Rutgers, Sumit Guha, sent to draw attention to the online portal to the Balochistan Archives. So many of us would love to go to Pakistan for research work, and so many of us will not be able to that any time soon. The availability of online records and files is still limited, but I hope the digital holdings grow quickly and soon.What is online already is fantastic--I just spent a large chunk of time reading about the 1935 Quetta Earthquake.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Mathias Metzger has made available a nice resource for scholars in Rajasthani studies. I stumbled across it while trying to track down a Vakil report. I've never been able to purchase personal copies of the A Descriptive List of the Vakil Reports Addressed to the Rulers of Jaipur books, and I've lost track of how many times I've checked the series out at my home library. Metzger's catalogue isn't complete, but it's a great start.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Verge: Studies in Global
Asias is a new journal that includes scholarship from
scholars in both Asian and Asian American Studies. These two fields have
traditionally defined themselves in opposition to one another, with the former
focused on an area-studies, nationally and politically oriented approach, and
the latter emphasizing epistemological categories,
including ethnicity and citizenship, that drew mainly on the history of the
United States. The past decade however has seen a series of rapprochements
in which, for instance, categories “belonging”to Asian American Studies
(ethnicity, race, diaspora) have been applied with increasing success to
studies of Asia. For example Asian Studies has responded to the postnational
turn in the humanities and social sciences by becoming increasingly open to
rethinking its national and regional insularities, and to work that pushes,
often literally, on the boundaries of Asia as both a place and a concept. At
the same time, Asian American Studies has become increasingly aware of the
ongoing importance of Asia to the Asian American experience, and thus more open
to work that is transnational or multilingual,
as well as to forms of scholarship that challenge the US-centrism of concepts
governing the Asian diaspora.

Verge showcases scholarship on “Asian” topics from
across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that
the changing scope of “Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of
vital critical concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge
emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and
regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist
(national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global)
modes Responding to the ways in which large-scale social, cultural, and
economic concepts like the world, the globe, or the universal (not to mention
East Asian cousins like tianxia or datong) are reshaping the ways
we think about the present, the past and the future, the journal publishes
scholarship that occupies and enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and
historical fields, from the ancient to the modern periods. The journal
emphasizes multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the
disciplines that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make
possible new conversations and new models of critical thought.

The history of
scholarship on Asian America, when juxtaposed with the fields of Asian Studies,
reminds us how much nations, national movements, and other forms of national
development continue to exert powerful effects on the world in which we live.
Such movements also remind us of the importance of inter-nationalism, of
the kinds of networks that can spring up between states and which can work to
disrupt the smooth passage of the planet into a utopian post-national future.
The growing interest in the global and the transnational across disciplines
thus brings the various Asia-oriented fields and disciplines—history and
literature, Asia and Asian America, East and South, modern and premodern—closer
together. This inaugural issue seeks to feature work that illustrates the
diverse engagements across disciplines (literature, history, sociology, art
history, political science, geography) and fields (Asian Studies and Asian
American Studies) that are possible once we begin thinking about the possible
convergences and divergences such divisions have traditionally represented.
We welcome a range of perspectives; featured contributors include Ien
Ang, Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Magnus Fiskejo, Pika
Ghosh, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Yunte Huang, Suk-young Kim, Joachim Kurtz, Meera Lee,
Wei Li, Colleen Lye, Sucheta Mazumdar, Tak-wing Ngo, Haun Saussy, David
Palumbo-Liu, Sheldon Pollack, Shuh-mei Shih, Eleanor Ty, and Jeffrey
Wasserstrom.

The
nature of Asian empires in the past, as well as the definition of imperialism
in contemporary times, is a topic of ongoing discussion among scholars from a
wide range of fields. In this special issue of Verge, we will explore a cluster of issues concerning the mechanics
and influence of empires, imperial authority, and imperial types of influence
over indigenous cultures and frontiers in Asia, as well as their diasporas
abroad and in the USA. We invite submissions that address one or some of the
following questions: How did various imperial efforts interact with local
concerns to shape the history of cross-cultural interactions in this region?
How did imperial regimes propose to solve the issue of a multi-ethnic empire?
What were the roles of specific geographic and economic spheres in Asia (such
as those of nomadic, agricultural, maritime, high altitude or lowland, and
far-flung/diasporic cultures) in contributing to the distinctive quality of
certain empires? How do certain characteristics of imperial administration and
control in Asia compare to those of imperial states in other regions of the
world? In addition to questions concerning the long history of Asian
imperialism and comparisons with other empires, we also solicit submissions
that speak to questions concerning contemporary Asian diasporas and their
reactions to various forms of imperialism in the modern age. Questions might
address such topics as “Yellow Peril” fears about Asian cultural imperialism;
Japanese internment camps as a US response to Japanese imperial expansion in
the Pacific; the Tibetan diaspora in South Asia and the Americas as a reaction
to contemporary Chinese imperialism; Vietnamese responses to French, Chinese,
or American imperialisms, and the treatment of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in
the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

Submission
deadline: April 1, 2014

Issue 3: COLLECTING (edited by Jonathan
Abel and Charlotte Eubanks)

As a construct and
product of powerful institutions from empires, to nation-states, museums, to
universities, Asia has long been formulated at the level of the collection.
Whether through royal court poetry compilations, colonial treasure
hunters, art historians, bric a brac shop keepers, or librarians of rare archives,
the role of collecting and classification has been deeply connected not only to
definitions of what counts as Asia and who can be considered Asian, but also to
how Asia continues to be configured and re-configured today.

With this in mind, this special
issue of Verge seeks to collect papers on the history, finance,
psychology, politics and aesthetics of collecting Asia in Asia and beyond.
This collection hopes not only to bring into relief how “Asia” has been
created but also to promote new definitions of Asia. What, for instance, are
the historical implications of government-sponsored poetry anthologies in
Mughal India, Heian-era Japan, or 20th century North Korea? What do the
contents of treasure-houses -- at Angkor Wat, Yasukuni Shrine, or Vishwanath --
tell us about evolving concepts of art and of the elasticity of cultural and
national contours? When did Japan become a geographical base for the collection
of Asia? Who collects Chinese books? How has Indian art been defined by
curatorial practices? Why did South Korea begin to collect oral histories
in the 1990s? What politics lie behind the exhibition of mainland Chinese
posters in Taiwan? How much money do cultural foundations spend on
maintaining collections? Where are the limits of Asian collections in
geographical and diasporic terms? How do constructions of these
collections impact our views of the collective, whether of Tibetan exiles in
Dharamsala, Japanese internment camps in Indonesia, global Chinatowns, or
adherents of new Asian religions in the Americas and former Soviet Republics?

This issue is interested
in the various cultures of collecting Asia and collecting Asians, in the many
politics of collecting, in the odd financial restrictions on collectors, in the
psychology of collecting, in the anthropology of how communities form around
collected objects, and in the sociology around collective histories.

Submission deadline:
November 15, 2014

Issue 4: ASIAN
URBANISMS AND URBANIZATIONS

(edited by Madhuri Desai and Shuang Shen)

In the contemporary age
of globalization, the city has gained new importance and attention as a center
of information industry, a node of transnational and translocal networks, and a
significant site of capital, labor migration and culture (Saskia Sassen, Manuel
Castells and David Harvey). While this renewed interest in the city both
perpetuates and revises theories of the city as a metaphor of modernity (Walter
Benjamin, Georg Simmel), it also opens up questions regarding the uniqueness
and relevance of earlier cities and their experience of urbanization. When we
move us away from Eurocentric understandings of modernity and time, it becomes
increasingly possible to study non-European urbanisms in the past and at
present with theoretical rigor and historical specificity. For this special
issue, we invite submissions (around 8000 words) that explore urbanism as a
site of comparison and connection among various Asian locales and beyond. We
are interested in not just studies of Asian cities and their urban experience
but also how “Asia” has been imagined both historically and contemporaneously,
through urbanism and urbanization, and how “Asia” as a term of travel is
registered in the urban space. This special issue will draw attention to the
following questions: As cities become increasingly connected and similar to
each other, how do they express their distinct identities as well as articulate
their unique histories? Besides circulation, movement, and networks that have
been much emphasized in contemporary studies of the city, how do borders,
checkpoints, and passwords function in urban contexts? How does the city
articulate connections between the local, the national, and the transnational?
How does the Asian experience of urbanization and ideas surrounding Asian
urbanism revise, rethink, and in some cases revive Asia’s colonial past? What
does the Western perspective on some Asian cities as unprecedented and
futuristic tells us about the imagination of Asia in the global context? How do
migrant and ethnic communities negotiate with and redefine the public space of
the city? How is the urban public shared or fragmented by co-existing ethnic
and religious communities? How is the rising cosmopolitanism of these cities
challenged through migration and sharply defined ethnic and religious
identities? We invite submissions that address these questions within the
context of Early modern, colonial and contemporary urbanisms and urbanizations.

"During his lifetime, the path-breaking and prolific lensman Raja Deen Dayal (1884-1905) was one of the most widely recognised photographers from the Indian subcontinent. Today he remains among the most celebrated figures from this earlier era. This book brings together for the first time extensive archival research with close analyses of the significant body of Dayal's work preserved in the Alkazi Collection of Photography. Over the course of his remarkable career, Dayal opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay, employing over fifty staff photographers and assistants. Together, they produced more than 30,000
images of architecture, landscape, and people that have played a central role in how India's past has been visualized. This volume explores varied topics, from Dayal's public works, state visit, and hunting photographs to his images chronicling India's elite and growing middle classes. In this way, lays the groundwork to rethink the history and practice of photography in India: as a commercial business, as an engagement with new technology, and as an aesthetic enterprise. It also demonstrates photography's unique trajectory in India and its inseparability from a larger world history of photography. This publication includes several appendices, including a Key to Dating the photographs produced by the Dayal Studio."

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship opportunities for U.S. citizens in India for
Academic Year 2014-15

India has the largest U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program in the world. You may
not know that more than 80 U.S. scholarships are awarded each year.

These are a few
things that may also be news to you:

USIEF has introduced Postdoctoral Fellowships,
for candidates who have earned a doctorate degree in the last five years.

Grants for teaching, teaching/research, and
research have been combined under Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional
Excellence award category, which is open to faculty and professionals in all
disciplines.

“Serial grants” will allow faculty the
opportunity to conduct research in India, during shorter in-country stays, over
the course of two years.
The Distinguished Chair award, designed for
eminent scholars with substantial teaching experience, offers the opportunity
to travel to prominent institutions in India to deliver guest lectures and
participate in conferences and workshop.

USIEF provides a dependent education allowance
up to $10,000.

For more
information on these grant options and benefits, visit CIESwebsite. The application deadline is August 1, 2013.

Recently, many U.S. institutions have sent delegations to India on fact finding missions to
engage strategically with their counterparts in India. A Fulbright-Nehru grant
is an excellent way to seed potential long-standing partnerships with Indian
institutions. In fact, each year we have grantees whose research collaborations
and other joint efforts lead to active engagement at an institutional level.
Help us identify worthy recipients! Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any
questions about our fellowship opportunities. We hope to welcome you and your
colleagues to India someday soon.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Heads up, graduate students--the CFP deadline has been extended to APRIL 2 for the South Asian conference at Stanford University:

Call for Papers: South Asia by the Bay at Stanford University

Graduate Student Conference at Stanford University

May 17 & 18, 2013 (Exact program and venue TBA)

Tense Times: Intimacies, Enemies, and Strangers in South Asia

As South Asia experiences rapid and unprecedented transformation, both scholarly and public interest in the region has grown dramatically in recent years. A large new generation of graduate students working on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences is in the process of rethinking approaches to the study of South Asian culture, society, politics, economics, law, history, literature, and the arts. South Asia by the Bay’s first graduate-student conference held at Stanford University last year was a resounding success yielding many important conversations and discussions.

This year we focus on the theme of Tense Times: Intimacies, Enemies, and Strangers in South Asia.

The past decade has been a time of profound transformation across South Asia. Popular democracy has deepened in Nepal and Bangladesh; the end of civil war in Sri Lanka has ushered in a period of rapid development and triumphant majoritarianism; Pakistan is living through its deepest political crisis ever. In India a long economic boom generated talk of a new era where the weight of the colonial past, the heavy presence of the postcolonial state, and entrenched conflicts of the past would give way to a new, more global and perhaps more liberal present. Yet, under such breezy talk of a new epoch, it is clear that the tacit social contract of the postcolonial era - between individuals, families and communities, between communities and the state, and so on - no longer provides a self-evident ground for social life.New momentous rifts, tensions and enmities are emerging as social aspirations have spread to every village and town across South Asia. Prompted by rapid economic growth, by displacements by civil war and insurgencies, and by agricultural and ecological crisis, more people than ever are on the move: to burgeoning cities, to seek a life, and to reinvent and redefine themselves. These multiple shifts affect everybody and everything: friendships, family dynamics, sexual identities, domesticities, notions of dignity, of labor, of danger and propriety, and of the very limits of what a possible life may look like. At stake are the most basic and complex relationships that define social life: who are my intimates? Who can I trust? Who can I love, and who must I loathe? How do I deal with, classify, or fear, the strangers that I encounter?

These seismic shifts in the ‘mentality of the governed’ shatter social hierarchies and established truths. They produce tense times.Every rapid transformation casts doubts on the weight, and the virtues, of the past. The past becomes tense, often transformed into a burden of ‘backwardness’ and bigotry. This is evident how many contemporary problems - corruption, violence or misogyny – routinely are framed as modern perversions of older practices and habits.

Similar disavowals took place during earlier moments of rapid change in the region –when emergent anti-colonial nationalism redefined the moral universe in South Asia and invented a new popular politics at the eve of the 20thcentury; or during the time of independence and utopian dreams across the colonial world in the 1940s.

This time, the emergence of a ‘new epoch’ appears to challenge the conventional spatial limits of South Asia. Concerns that are intensely lodged in South Asian cultural and historical spaces immediately generate a global debate, virtual communities and repercussions: a brutal rape in Delhi, anti-corruption protests led by a latter-day Gandhi, war-crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army during the final weeks of the civil war in 2009, to mention a few recent examples.

The second South Asia at the Bay Graduate Conference wishes to explore how large-scale transformations in South Asia touch and condition the individual and intimate lives of ordinary people – both in the present and in a longer historical perspective. We invite submissions from graduate students working in the humanities and social sciences that address the moral, political and epistemological quandaries of current and historical transformations in the region. We encourage submissions that fall within one or more of the subthemes outlined below:

Political Love South Asia has the richest and most diverse and contradictory political scene in the world. Millions of people throw themselves into passionate attachments to both abstract principles and more concrete causes. This rich political world has conventionally been understood through well known cultural and social tropes: asceticism, caste loyalties, honor, fear of pollution, and so on. But what does ‘political love’ do to other, more intimate, attachments and obligations? Can one’s sacrifice for the ‘the people’ still allow for a productive and full life? How can we understand the love of politics, the people, or the community, as forces in their own right beyond mere self-interest?

Caste, Disgust, AttractionContrary to the expectations of the first post independence generations, rising levels of education and economic development did not make caste and community loyalties less of a factor in social life across South Asia. Instead, caste is today arguably more salient than ever before: in politics, in associational life, in education, in patterns of habitation. Despite unprecedented social heterogeneity in workplaces and institutions there are few signs that caste is ‘melting into air’. Movements promoting inter-caste marriages in the 1960s and 70s seem to have given way to substantialized caste identities and declining numbers of inter-caste unions. Matching agencies and internet dating sites today promise a more precise matching of individuals according to caste and class than ever before. Are patterns of love and intimate attachment less socially emancipated today than they used to be? If so, why?

The "State" of SexualityThe past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in feminist and/or LGBT/queer movements that seek to seize or transform the language of the “state” for liberatory ends. Such an attachment to a reparative or divisive logic of the “state” is most evident in India, especially after the repeal of statutes such as Section 377. In the face of contemporary challenges to scholarship and activism promoting a globalizing queer and feminist agenda, one must ask how sexuality, and sexual identities in the broadest sense, relate to the “state”, and to the law of different states? Are key assumptions about freedom, rights and the subject that have driven scholarship and activism in this field being curtailed or enabled by such a focus on the power of states to recognize and authorize certain identities and identity labels?

Friendship at LargeWith unprecedented scales and numbers of migrants across the length and breadth of South Asia, the questions of alignments, of loyalties, of the paramount importance of community boundaries and morality seem in new flux. In the vast labor pools working in plantations, mines, in the urban slums and peripheries, but also in the mushrooming educational institutions and white-collar work places, the questions of trust and friendship are being renegotiated and expanded on a daily basis. The result does not appear to be the spontaneous growth of proletarian solidarities, as earlier generations of activists and labor historians hoped. Instead we witness flexible segmentation of alliances and civilities, and new enmities and competitions, each of them bound up around specific timeframes and conditions. Are such civilities and enmities still intelligible through our well-known categories of kinship, biraderi, caste and community? Or do we need a new conceptualization of work, of friendship and alliances?

Beauty and Modern Bodies in South AsiaThe very idea of being ‘modern’ and of living a modern life is historically connected with certain aesthetic forms and regimes: smoothness of appearance, style and character; sartorial individuality; authentic self expression indicating interior depth; uncluttered surroundings that foreground autonomous and self-contained beings and objects; clean, controlled and continent bodies.In South Asia, modernity is indeed strongly articulated around ideals of beauty and appearance – beauty pageants, new public aesthetics in films and advertising, extensive use of beauty products but also a new emphasis on self-presentation in domestic spaces: home décor, consumer goods, brand awareness and so on. How do the modern bodies and public aesthetics in South Asia articulate global and commercially mediated notions of the modern individuality with older cultural frames in the region?

Strangers and Neighbors in South Asian CitiesAs urban areas grow rapidly across South Asia, the very structure and feel of the urban are also transforming. New technologies redefine social relationships and make crowds, gatherings and public interactions more selective and structured, enabling more precise and comprehensive forms of social segregation than before. Most fast growing cities in South Asia are new, displaying seemingly chaotic patterns of urban growth that deepen the segmentations along class, community and caste that was the hallmark of the colonial city, while hollowing out the meanings of ‘public space’ and a ‘public sphere’. These developments may ultimately challenge most of the established paradigms in urban theory. It may be timely to ask if the very idea of the modern city is being redefined in South Asia at this time?

South Asia by the Bay inaugurates an unprecedented collaboration among several universities within California: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Santa Cruz.We aim to establish an annual forum where graduate students from across disciplines and institutions in North America, who work on South Asia, can meet to discuss their work with each other, and with South Asia affiliated faculty from the organizing institutions and beyond. Besides keynotes by important scholars in the field, we will hold interactive sessions with faculty on the international job market in South Asian studies, film screenings, and social events.

Deadline for Submissions:

Panels: APRIL 2 , 2013

Individual Papers: APRIL 2, 2013

For panel submissions, please submit the particiapants abstracts, CVs, and travel grant note, along with an overall description of the panel.

Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length.

Please note that a limited number of travel grants are available for graduate students travelling to Stanford. In order to be considered for such a grant, please submit a letter outlining how much you are applying for and indicate why such funding is necessary.All communications should be sent to southasiabythebay@gmail.com and copied to Kashika Singh kashika@stanford.edu

Monday, February 18, 2013

S. R. Sarma recently sent me an announcement for a new journal, History of Science in South Asia, which he describes as a publication "for the history of all forms of scientific thought and action, ancient and modern, in all regions of South Asia." The editorial board is seeking submissions, read the focus and scope and information for authors sections for more details.

This workshop draws on a range of disciplines (history, anthropology and literature) to explore questions of how writing literally under-wrote projects of cultural dominance and resistance in this key region of the world. Beyond the activity of mere inscription, our workshop focuses historically on the material and symbolic ways writing served to establish and maintain cultural forms of power. We also seek to explore questions about how writing was a strategy for redefining and transforming the historical terrain on which people in South Asia constructed and organized their lives. Our various participants bring together a mixture of language varieties (classical and vernacular) in various scripts and genres to demonstrate how writing in different political and social constituencies impacted cultural life in South Asia, especially in regions beyond the Hindi heartland. The workshop thus has the overall goal of advancing a more general and comparative understanding of the relationship between language, culture and power in South Asia.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Good news for musicologists and historians of sound comes to us via Abhijit Bhattacharya at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) is now online. Curated by Vikram Sampath and colleagues, the online collection includes 600+ samples (taken largely from 78 RPM gramaphone shellacs) representing the work of about 180 artists. As I type this, I am listening (again) to Gandhiji read aloud his article "On God." Judging by the number of hits for that particular page, I am not the only one who went directly to that file. I selected Bina Chaudury's "Ek jhalak dekha kidkhi se" and now I might have a new favorite song and artist.

A caveat: the list of artists is alphabetized by first name, so if you are looking for a clip based on the last name, you may have difficulty finding it by browsing only. The ctrl-F search is your friend.

About This Blog

A compilation of research notes made while conducting research in London, France, and India for a Ph.D. dissertation in architectural history. Occasional updates and notes added as I come across interesting things while working on my book manuscript (working title: Astronomy in Motion).